Folks here are busy pushing astro-tourism, hoping to lure stargazers to the desert with promises of dark nights.

First they have to get through some dark days.

Last week’s murder of the respected editor of the Borrego Sun in a divorce turned murder-suicide has staggered the town, right on the eve of what is annually its biggest celebration.

“Borrego Days,” a three-day festival of food, crafts and music, is scheduled for next weekend. The new Miss Borrego will be crowned. A parade will march down Palm Canyon Drive.

It will be the 46th annual gathering, and mostly what it celebrates is the end of summer and the awakening of a sleepy desert getaway that goes into full snooze pretty much right after Memorial Day.

Gone are the energy-sapping, tourist-scaring triple-digit daytime temperatures. Back come the part-time residents — the population of about 3,000 more than doubles after summer — and back come some of the heat-shuttered businesses. Back come the visitors drawn to the sparse beauty of the sprawling Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.

Nobody was more attuned to those yearly vibrations than Judy Winter Meier, the slain 61-year-old newspaper editor. She’d been working at the 3,000-circulation Sun since the mid-1970s, covering government meetings, taking photographs at school events, writing editorials and folksy columns. She was an institution.

It seems everybody knew her. Borrego has no local TV station, no dedicated Internet site. The mostly-retired residents aren’t likely to be texting or Twittering the latest goings-on. So a printed newspaper here isn’t a dinosaur; it’s a lifeline.

“It’s our communications center,” said Emmy Lou Brandt, who’s been coming to Borrego for more than 30 years and has lived there full-time for six. “As soon as it comes out, people read it from cover to cover. Then we talk about it. ‘Did you see that in the Sun?’”

Seasonal residents like Bill Walker, who spends his summers in Canada, even have the twice-monthly paper mailed to them year-round. “It’s the best way to keep track of what’s going on,” he said.

The paper isn’t filled with the kind of stuff that wins Pulitzers. It’s park board meetings about the cost to irrigate Christmas Circle, Borrego’s equivalent of the town square. It’s photo spreads on the partial demolition of the old Valley Foods store. It’s calendar listings for quilting, art and wine-tasting classes.

People said they feel connected when they read the Sun — connected to the town, and connected to each other.

And they’re determined not to lose that.

Bouquets, and more

Of course there were flowers.

After the murder, people did what people do all over the world now in the wake of a high-profile tragedy: They left bouquets.

Then they did something else. They called the Sun and asked if they could help.

Need someone to take pictures? Need someone to proofread? Need someone to go to a meeting and tell you what happened? The offers kept coming.

“That’s just the kind of town this is,” said Betsy Knaak, executive director of a local desert-education program, and one of those offering to pitch in.